Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

> maximizing user satisfaction

I'm never going to be satisfied with Spotify's recommendations until it's easy for me to curate the input to the recommender.

As things stand, to prevent Spotify from giving me crap recommendations, I have to keep secrets from it! If I want to listen to Led Zeppelin once but don't want Spotify to think "oh I should recommend classic rock from now until the end of time", then I have to go to a different app (YouTube or whatever).

There's a "private session" feature in Spotify which allows me to prevent searches and listens from entering into history, but Spotify really really doesn't want me to use it — it's cumbersome to access and it gets turned off automatically after a few hours.

EDIT:

The satisfaction achieved by whole-account recommendations determined by algorithm described in this post is going to be crushed by some app which gives me a UI where I can say "give me recommendations based on these N arbitrary things". Not just "this one artist" or "everything in my history". Let me design my own recommended channel.

Add to that having kids at home that sometimes listen to Paw Patrol and you will end up with a daily mix that consists of (in my case): Death Metal, news, random clip from paw patrol, German rap (I only like one artist not that genre in general).

I’ve been longing for a “kids mode” for a long time.

The "exclude from your taste profile" option in playlists might be helpful in your case.

I gave my kid it's own Spotify account (we have a family subscription), and I installed "island" in android enabling me to install a separate Spotify instance logged into their account. Now I have 2 Spotifys installed in parallel, one for me and one for them.

You can do this in Spotify now by creating a playlist and then playing the station driven from that playlist.

I find that spotify will tend to just smash music from my other playlists and other history into that station. I can never get it to recommend me new stuff.

The autogenerated genre playlists have this issue too. "House Music" is a very broad genre (or metagenre, given how many subgenres exist), so you'd think that they wouldn't end up being largely comprised of tracks I already have on my own playlist. And the rest end up being kind of bland and not really quite what I'm looking for.

I seem to remember that Spotify used to have a heavy focus on employee-operated playlists that curated new releases, though I didn't really take advantage of them at the time. The newer (cheaper) algorithm-driven ones don't really cut it.

They removed this feature. Now there is a psuedo-replacement called "enhanced shuffle" which interleaves recommended songs in your shuffled playlist. Unfortunately, this drastically reduces the amount of song discovery per unit time.

This is a huge bummer! I wonder why they removed the playlist station feature.

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